Widowed

I

Two hours before, the house had been murmurous with the hushed voices of people speaking in whispers while they made inroads on Mary’s ham and chocolate cake. Now it was empty. The parlor, no longer stimulated by the undertaker’s potted palms, had relapsed into its familiar, red-plush primness, and was already beginning to smell musty. The shades were drawn. Wilted petals had been swept from the floors. The remains of the food were put away.

Mary wiped the dish pan, turned it upside down on the drain board, and stood for a moment, her wet hands dripping above the sink. They were worn and tired hands. Her plain round face was colorless. Her eyes held a look of childlike bewilderment.

Myra, of course, had offered to stay. ‘You’ll need someone with you,’ Myra had said. ‘It’s not good to be alone just at first.’

‘I guess I’d rather be by myself, if you don’t mind, Myra,’ Mary had answered firmly. And so Myra had gone, her gaunt face troubled.

A wave of fatigue swept over Mary. She turned from the sink and her glance wandered about the kitchen, resting in turn upon the scarred wood box, the battered stove, and the stained drain board. The worn spots in the dark linoleum stared up at her. They were deepest before the stove and the sink.

She reached up for the roller towel and then paused. The towel was clean. There was no brown smudge where Henry had wiped his face and hands without having washed them enough. How often she had snapped at Henry for dirtying her towel. Now it was stiff and alien.

II

The house was strangely silent.

Well, she must n’t stand here. There were the evening chores to be done, the stock to feed. Jim Taylor, awed and silent in the presence of grief, had milked old Boss, and fed and watered Bill and Charlie, the plough horses. That left only the chickens and the pair of geese Henry had been fattening for Christmas.

The loose boards of the back porch creaked under her feet. She closed the door behind her and stood leaning against it for a moment while the evening breeze blew wisps of damp hair across her face. The red barn loomed big in the rainy twilight. There was still light enough to see the yellow of the leaves on the great maple outside its door. Silky, the collie, emerged, wagging, from his bed behind the washtub, and Mary was grateful for his greeting.

The tangled grass along the edge of the path was turning brown. It caught at her skirts as she passed, and her shoes became clotted with mud. Silky picked his way delicately among the puddles and paused in the momentary dryness of the woodshed. The wood was getting low. She would have to get her winter supply from George Davis soon.

The twilight darkness of the barn was warm and sweet-scented and very still. Mary felt a little shock of surprise not to see Henry’s lean form moving among the shadows, not to hear his gruff commands to the horses. She dipped into the feed box and let the smooth grains of corn drip through her fingers on to the pan. Their gentle ‘tunking’ was loud in the stillness.

Mary was careful not to spill any of the corn on the floor, or in the covered passageway to the henhouse. Henry had always fussed when he came across spilt kernels.

‘I’m not spending good money to feed rats,’he would say, and Mary always felt a stab of resentment. She had bought the grain herself out of her egg money, and, besides, there were no rats in the barn. But now she could not spill the grain. Poor Henry. He had been a good man.

The hens were restless and hungry and she did not have to call them. They crowded around her feet, snatching up the yellow corn. The geese were still missing.

‘Here, Columbus! Here, Queenie!’ Mary called. A sound of beating wings and honking rose from the weedy duck pond, and after a moment two stately forms appeared over the bank and waddled toward her. Queenie’s pace remained dignified, even haughty, when she saw the corn in Mary’s outstretched hand, but Columbus hurled himself forward, his great wings half lifting him from the ground. His little eyes glittered. Mary scattered the corn before him, and he had gobbled half of it before Queenie reached the spot.

She ignored him and paddled without haste or hesitation to the golden spatter at Mary’s feet. She selected a grain and reached for it with deliberation, but Columbus’s eagerness was too quick for her. He jostled against her, almost upsetting her balance, and the grain disappeared in his darting yellow bill. Queenie’s dignity deserted her. She flew at him with a low, vicious hiss and pecked him away. Mary laughed. For the remainder of the meal Queenie stood in the centre of the corn, but Columbus dived between Mary’s feet as often as he dared.

‘That’s the way men are,’ Mary said to Queenie. ‘Anything there is — they think they own it. Many’s the time I’ve wanted to peck my Henry!’

But Henry was dead. She would never see him again, and the house was dark in the purple twilight. There were no lights in the windows.

She locked the geese in the hencoop and called Silky. The wind blew the shadows of leaves from the maple and they followed her, ghostlike, up the path. It was too dark to see her way on the back porch, and she stumbled against strange objects. Henry always got in before she did and lit the lamp. Mary groped uncertainly in the dark kitchen before she found the matches.

The glow of the lamp created shapeless shadows which crouched in the corners, vaguely menacing. They followed her about the house while she locked the doors, shut the windows, and pulled the shades. Blackness closed behind her as she climbed the stairs.

Myra had taken Henry’s things out of the bedroom, and it was very neat. Henry’s trousers were not on the chair and his sweaty shirt was not hanging from the door knob. The patchwork quilt on the bed was very smooth.

Mary put the lamp on the bureau. Her eyes avoided the empty room. She undressed slowly, hanging her gingham dress in the closet, folding her undergarments carefully on the straight-backed chair. No gruff masculine complaints broke the chill silence. The scent of tobacco had died from the room.

Mary turned down the lamp, watching the shadows creep farther and farther out of the corners until they engulfed her.

The linen sheets were cold, and Mary lay cramped on the edge of the bed, as she had done when Henry was lying slantwise across three quarters of it. She could not sprawl on Henry’s side of the bed. The coldness of the sheets rejected her. The darkness was heavy with loneliness.

III

She awakened with an overwhelming sense of being entirely unprotected and heard her own voice calling desperately, ‘Henry! Henry — ’ The room was pitch-dark, and for a moment the strident combination of wild cackling and hysterical crowing in the hen yard beat unrecognized against her benumbed brain. Then she understood.

‘Oh, my!’ Mary said. ‘Oh, my!’ She fell back on the pillow. The fox had gotten into the hen yard again.

She must get up, she told herself firmly. She must get up! She must find Henry’s shotgun and shoot the fox. Henry would want her to shoot it. But Henry was n’t there. All her exhausted body rebelled at the thought of going out into the dark and the rain. Sleep drifted over her before she could force herself out of bed.

When she awoke gray morning was in the room.

‘My land!’ Mary said. She put on shoes and stockings and slipped a coat over her nightgown. With guilty haste her feet pattered down the back stairs and splashed through the puddles on the path to the henhouse. A weak sun was trying unsuccessfully to pierce the restless clouds. From somewhere in the maple a bird chirped uncertainly.

The hen yard was agitated with milling white forms. Mary counted the hens anxiously. There was still a note of hysteria in their clucking and they edged away from a hole under the fence, but they were all there. Queenie was running from the henhouse to the yard, honking. But Columbus was gone. Splashes of blood, a few wisps of red fur, and a scattering of gray feathers told the story.

Mary sighed. It could have been much worse, of course, but she had liked Columbus.

‘He was a fine bird,’ she said regretfully, as she blocked the hole under the fence with stones.

Queenie had gone through the barn and was pushing against the henhouse door from inside. Mary opened it for her and the pink, webbed feet splashed through the wet grass to the duck pond.

Mary called to her while she was feeding the chickens, but Queenie was slow in coming. When she finally appeared she paid no attention to the corn Mary tossed toward her. Her cleargray body disappeared in the gloom of the barn.

She was still in the barn when Mary came back an hour later. The gray feathers were disheveled now, but she continued her patient search, poking behind the harnesses and under wagons. She even managed to climb up into the hayloft, from which she descended in a whir of beating wings.

Mary poured a pail of foaming milk into a big pewter-colored can. ‘It’s no use,’ she said gently, as she watched Queenie waddle off to search the yard again. ‘You can’t find him. He’s gone — like my Henry.’

All the morning Mary watched Queenie’s hurrying distress. The ruffled, fat body squeezed behind the woodpile and emerged again to peer under the porch. No cranny in the stone wall beyond the barn escaped her. She went again and again to the same places, her bill swinging from side to side in an attempt to look everywhere at once. Mary could n’t get the unhappy creature out of her mind. Sweeping off the back steps, she saw the gray figure perched precariously on the woodpile trying to look into the ice house.

‘Why, she feels almost like me, the poor soul,’ Mary said aloud.

The worried note in Queenie’s honking grew louder, but it was not until noon that she acknowledged herself defeated. Mary saw her straggle wearily over to the big maple and crouch close to the bark. Her head was drawn far into her feathered ruff.

IV

Queenie remained there, motionless, while the afternoon grew colder and the heavy clouds thickened and dissolved again in occasional spatters of rain. Silky barked playfully at her, but she only drew her head farther into her ruff. Yellow leaves drifted down on to her back, but she did not move to shake them off. She was still sitting there when Mary returned to the house after the evening chores were done.

‘Yes, I know,’Mary said to the forlorn figure. ‘He pestered the life out of you when he was alive, and now he’s gone you wish he was back to pester you.’ She held out a handful of corn. ‘You’d better try and eat something,’Mary said, awkwardly. Queenie did not move.

Mary scattered the corn before her and went away. Her own loneliness lay heavy upon her. All day she had tried to bury it under little jobs — mending or making gingerbread. There was no one to mend for, no one to eat the gingerbread.

At the back steps she paused. The house was unnaturally still. Mary hesitated and then sat down on the bottom step, her head propped on her worn hands. Her eyes stared unseeing at the horizon. Below the bank of leaden clouds in the west a red stain from the hidden sunset drained through. The air was cold and there was no one near her.

She did not hear a rustling in the leaves or the sound of soft webbed feet on the hard-packed earth. She was only conscious, suddenly, of a friendly warmth, close to her. She groped toward it and her fingers sank deep in smooth feathers. After a moment she felt a light, firm pressure on her knee. It was Quecnie’s head. With tender fingers Mary stroked its soft grayness.

They remained so, in a long silence. Soothed by each other, they listened to the grave lowing of cows in the barn. Around them falling leaves whispered in the dusk, and from down the valley the deep baying of a dog came to them on the wind. The sound was thin and far away. Slowly the twilight flowed down upon them, its shadowy purple closing around them in coolness and in peace.